Defense *far* too strong

XP isnt the only measure of the value of a ship.

There are military racial bonuses, planet building and
global effects that can greatly enhance the abilities
of a ship.

Without knowing what these were at in your particular
game, the developers can not really act on your
suggestion.

For instance, if he had tri-strominium armor and
some big ship bonuses, then it would and should
make sense for his battle axe to beat multiple
smaller ships.

But then again you may be right, but you have to
understand that you need to know and provide a lot
more relevant details before a developer can act
on your concerns.

this isnt realy a problem IMHO.
your complaining that a light combat/patrol craft cant easily kill a heavily armored defence ship from the next generation of technology.

Get your hands on an even slightly heavyer ship and the problem will disapear. Go do some testing in the Simulator over in the Metaverse, but i would say that overall Battlehammers are you best bet.

Against orbiting battleaxes, you will have to either:

A) Wait until you get a battle cruiser.
Upgrade your corvettes stats with shipyard facilities.
C) Upgrade your corvettes stats by having them gain experience on easier targets.
D) All of the above.

Use the Galactic Battle Simulator in the Metaverse to get an idea of how strong a ship you'll need to defeat an orbiting battleaxe.

His DEF score was a 6 with 61 HP. My corvettes had an ATT of between 3 and 5, with 13 HP. There were no starbases in the sector.

Oh, and Corvettes and Battle Axes *are* the same generation ships. You need a lvl3 weapons tech for corvettes and a lvl3 def tech for battle axes

Sw. Ships orbiting a planet gain a "homefield advantage" defense bonus as well.

Staffa raises a good point about bonuses. that is all unknown to us...

however with just the base stats its predicted that it will on average take 10 vets to kill an Axe. This sounds realy weird till you notice that the Axe's base defence (5)is almost double the 'vet's base attack.(3) The axe only loses about 4 hp per engagement.

Actually corvettes come off the level 2 techs of phasers and photons. they allow you to research corvette tech. (a special level 2 dead end tech.)

Defenders are the equivalent on the defensive side coming when deflectors are researched.

So I'd classify corvettes as the level 2.5 or 2 special. They don't require either of the 2 true level 3 weapons techs.

I think battle goes something like this.

You attack with a roll of up to 3 (or 5) against his defense of up to 6. (you won't get to many hits on average)

Then if he has not been eliminated he gets an attack of up to 1/2 his def (in ths case 3) against what ever your def was.

If you are still there this repeats until a ship dies.

When all ships (of one of you) are dead battle ends.

I think in this case the big difference is the total hit points and his 6 def.

Elrikk


~SDC~

Just wait until you get a better ship. If you send corvettes against an orbiting battleaxe, you will only succeed in giving the battleaxe lots of experience points and making it even harder to crack.

As the game proceeds, offense gains a lot more than defense. You will see. I still use battleaxes for guard duty even late in the game.

The orbiting bonus, the '1/2 defense added to attack on strike back' bonus, combined with greater hitpoints means you were very much outmatched. Never get into a battle where you have to send ship after ship against a defender if you can help it, because he is leveling up on those failed attacks and thus getting harder and harder to defeat.

Like most games you have to get a feel for how strong defense is vs. offense at any given stage of the game. For GalCiv it's something like this: very weak early defense, very strong early-mid defense, past this point it gets harder to say because how you build as a player makes a huge difference. If you build up a starbase with massive defensive modules then you'll have a very strong defense throughout the game when coupled with the right ships. If not, then defense becomes problematic vs. dreadnaughts and better once that stage is reached.

You basically got frustrated by the extremely strong early-mid game defense, that's just not a good time to attack (cost/benefit ratio is way too high). The appearance of the battle axe is usually a sign to end the early phase of your wars and spend time teching up in preparation for a mid-game assault.

Well, I tend to find that battleships pretty much level the defense playing field unless some nice defense bonuses are on the defender's side. Don't even need dreads most of the time, the BBs can clean house pretty well usually. The battleship age also spells dead starbases. So, defense is only strong to a point. Additionally, since the aliens generally race up the ship development tree to BB as fast as they can, it isn't long before the age of the lone defending battleaxe comes to an end.

All good points S-W.

Basically you're taking the second wimpiest combat ship in the game with a tiny attack score up against the best defense ship in the early game...which has nearly 5x as many hit points as you...while its orbiting a planet and thus gets a defense bonus on top of that...and you're surprised you're being slaughtered?

That's like taking a bunch of Jeeps up against an M1 Tank and expecting to actually damage it...

...and by the time you run into Excaliburs, attack should be just about everything (base 80 ATT, 20 DEF for a huge 4:1 ratio) barring a multi-world system with Planetary / System / Omega defense systems (not sure if same systems on multiple planets in the same system stack... or even quite what Plaentary Defense ability applies to).

Swarming with weaker ships doesn't work too well in GalCiv, since there doesn't appear to be a bonus for attacking with a fleet. If your ships individually do minimal damage at best and none with high probability, then all you're doing is giving a nice experience boost.

As for starbases... I count +12 ATT, +2 speed / -1 enemy speed, and a mere +1 defense (except for the base itself, which can get a +64 if memory serves) as the possible bonuses. That would seem to favor counterattacks with reasonably fast, medium ships becoming faster and deadlier. The bonuses don't appear to be affected by weapon / defense abilities, though.

sw: If there is any problem, it´s the precise opposite: There are no really decent defenders in the Battleship/Dreadnought period.

All you need do is get a few Battlehammers, and the Axes are galactic history.

Did you have the ships in a fleet? Ships not in a fleet don't work as well. If you sent all the ships in a fleet, it would work like this:

Crv1: At 5 Df 3
Crv2: At 4 Df 3
Crv3: At 6 Df 3

BattleAxe: At 2 Df 6

The corvettes sum their attack powers (i.e. all three attack and the sum of the rolls gives the total attack for "Turn 1," the expected value of the sum in this case being 7.5). Then the BattleAxe rolls for defense, an average of three. So you do 3.5 damage in a turn on average. Then the Battleaxe attacks your strongest ship with an average damage of 4, while your average defense would be 1.5. So it would do 2.5 damage on average, killing your strongest corvette in about 5 turns, and losing about 17.5 hp in the process. However, once it's killed the first corvette, that's gonna drop your attack below the point where you can regularly do any significant damage to it, so it will kill the other two without taking damage.

If you didn't have the ships stacked, you didn't have a hope, because a corvette cannot do any damage to a battleaxe alone. And here I accidentally gave corvettes a good deal more attack than they actually have, so you would be lucky to do any damage at all with just three in a fleet. You would have to have a fleet of at least six before you could reasonably expect to do any significant damage per turn. Here's the simulator report:

The defending ship (Battleaxe) is expected to win 100% of engagements, with an average of 36 hit points remaining.

On average, it would take 10 attacking ships (corvettes stacked in fleet) to destroy one defender.

Anytime you attack when your attack value is less than their defense value, you're not only going to lose out big, but you wont really damage them either. Add to the fact that Corvettes dont have many hit points to begin with, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Are you sure about that Blue Ocean? I was told that each ship in a fleet has its own little battle, just as if you selected each one individually and sent them against the enemy. The only function the fleet performs is making movement simpler, but that it has no role at all in battles. :notsure:

It would be interesting to set up an experiment to see which is true, unless you've already done that.

Also, I have some corvettes with 13 attack 9 defense. So yes, corvettes can still be useful later in the game. My corvettes can regularly solo against battle cruisers (with four times as many hit points) and usually win , which frees up my slow battleships & dreadnoughts to take out the bigger targets. Unfortunately there aren't too many enemy battle cruisers left for them, so now they just camp out raiding freighters & constructors. They are also good as bait to lure enemies into my 'battleship traps'.

I'm pretty sure they're rated individual because I a cluster of about 15 fighters (AT 4 at the time) go against a Dreadnaught (AT:35 D:25) and they got swallowed even though my cumulative attack was 60, and I dont think I even did 20 damage to the dread.

There were also reports of stacks of 70+ Precursor Corvettes attacking and losing to single ships, which really shouldn't happen if their attack values were added up; even if each additional one only gave a slight bonus, it'd still be anomalous.

I once received a huge stack of Pre-Cursor Corvettes. 100 of them. I didn't need them so I decided to see what they could do for me if I sent them on a rampage. The results were odd. They were mostly attacking Dreadnaughts, sometimes defending against them. I would have battles where 20 odd corvettes would die to kill a single dreadnaught. Then I'd have a battle where I'd kill the Dreadnaught and suffer maybe 3 losses. I was actually expecting them to just get slaughtered, since the dreadnaught out-classes them so badly. Failing that, you'd think they would do more-or-less consistently well, but even when the stack was down to just 8(!) Corvettes they still took out a half-strength dread. And these were seriously souped up dreadnaughts too.

#19 forceinfinity

I havnt done any math or tests on the subject as I
dont really fight often, but I have noticed that
fleets do signifigantly better then solo ships.

In your given example, after the first round you would
have done 60-25 or 35 damage, a dreadnought as
about 100 hitpoints?

if in the counter attack, the defenses dont stack, and
they probably dont, the dreadnought would probably
kill a 3rd of your corvettes right there in the first
round. The 2nd round you would then only have 10 left
or 40 damage, and hence do 15 damage, and by the
3rd round you wouldnt be doing diddly squat.

So you would do about 50 damage in your example, which
would still have you losing.

There have been earlier discussions on the board that I can remember about fleet stacking bonuses or not. Brad's answer basically was that there is no intention to allow ships to attack as a group, only one on one. If you drive your three ship stack into another lone ship, you may get the illusion that there are three ships attacking at once, but it is really 3 separate battles being ran back to back.

Twirlip, planetary defense structures boost your defense against troop invasion, they have no effect on ship-to-ship fighting. I was curious about this one time so checked it, and CariElf confirmed this.

Which makes sense, because if they did boost ship defense then if you stacked those with starbase boosts as well you'd have an insane bonus. But I do think the maintenance costs of the planetary defenses are set way too high. I never build them because of that.